Doves are white. So are wedding gowns and ballrooms. A blank canvas, a raw slate, not yet tarnished by ink , is also white.  White is innocence and happy laughter, all the colors of the rainbow merged into one—it’s a soul in the most taintless form. But the hospital walls morph the color into something different, something unrecognizable. Sinister, even. On every surface and uniform and medical instrument, it doesn’t just give color, it tints the objects lurid. The hospital wouldn’t be the same without it. A white hell, path lit with glaring fluorescent lights and dainty plastic pots of flowers.

Staring at it for too long suffocates him, invisible hands creep up his body, untouchable yet relentlessly gripping, nauseating touches that leave him perturbed. And he can’t push them away once they grab onto him.

But the blue gives solace.

Whenever he catches a glimpse of the rich shade, or manages to find the original white in the mass of fake, he’s calmed beyond words. He finds relief and comfort in the blue. But most important of all is the loyalty. The blue would never refuse him or be twisted into something else, as long it wins against the gray, it would never fail him. The white too, if it meets with blue, turns pure. It enhances the blue’s solidity with its own, freely swirling into the shade for a sight beyond words.

It aggravates him that he can see this sight so little. That it’s always blocked in favor of the falsified white. It drives him mad.

°°°

It’s white that paves the way to Eunhyuk’s hospital room.

The color envelopes his body in the guise of bed sheets and a pillow, almost blending with his platinum blonde locks and ivory skin, trying to engulf him whole.

Donghae has already been sitting at his side for an hour, waiting for the boy to wake up. But the medical therapy was too strong. The liquefied doses still flowing through the IV drip into his arm.

He had already been made to swallow antipsychotic pills earlier in the day, the dosage administered now was only for precaution, a nurse had told him. Something to control his behavior if he reacts violently to the treatment.

They say they want to help him, but all they do is pump his body full of drugs. If drugs could change people for the better, why were there addicts in jail?

Donghae doesn’t understand the thought process. He starts deciphering it when Eunhyuk wakes up, eyes wide, looking about the room.

Donghae starts talking to him at once, jumping, but then realizes that the other can’t hear his words. He’s barely conscious, caramel orbs darting everywhere, mouth moving to form soundless letters.

He calls a nurse in alarm, but she reassures him with a smile that “He might just feel numb. Don’t worry, the feeling will get easier to overcome with each session”.

Donghae looks back at Eunhyuk in concern. The other’s eyes are glassy and his thumbs are twitching. He doesn’t seem aware of the hand gripping his. He doesn’t seem to see Donghae either, instead, his vision, Donghae looks behind himself to follow the now still gaze, is directed outside the window.

His vision is directed outside the window, and stays staring at the moving clouds until the drugs pull him into a dreamless sleep.

°°°

The next day, Donghae visits and sits by Eunhyuk’s side again, and the boy opens his eyes just like before. But this time it’s different, because Donghae knows he’s awake.

Even though his eyes are still out of focus, they’re looking right at Donghae’s own.

He recognizes the look in them. Helpless, filled with anxiety, questioning—asking, the reason why. They stir at the highest peak of turmoil and then turn back into expressionless glass.

°°°

Donghae visits regularly even though Eunhyuk is always asleep or incoherently lucid when he’s there. It’s quiet and calm in the room, and his state allows Donghae to think.

Long hours lost in his thoughts lead Donghae to conclusions.

Hospitals are the unjust beneficiaries of mankind, Donghae decides. They take so much money, receive so much help, yet make so many mistakes. They aren’t fit to get the credit. They just want more patients. They’ll label someone sick if the action helps raise a salary.

Hey, you see that guy over there?

They would deem him crazy if he says he wants to take Eunhyuk out of the hospital with him. But he doesn’t expect them to have that look when he tells them he doesn’t mind spending time with Eunhyuk, shocked faces and steps back hearing his reply to their inquiry, because he’s not obliged to visit the other, the abnormal child. It isn’t long before they start to avoid him too.

Ah, that one, what about him?

They say he ran away before.

He gives them too much credit—underestimates their contempt and overestimates their humanity.  A mistake he should have already known not to make.

Ran away?

They treat him like a kindergartener, as if he’s a newborn, confused and lacking understanding of the world. Donghae knows better. He tries to tell them, but they choose to not listen. Eunhyuk isn’t a poor child lost in a scary realm, and they aren’t his saviors. Eunhyuk is a healthy grown male with college-level intelligence, he just sees the world differently. The only thing they’re doing is trying to convince him otherwise.

He was diagnosed a long time ago with the same condition, but he ran away from the hospital before he was cured.

He tightens his hold on Eunhyuk’s hand.

Really? So what’s going to happen now?

He’s not insane.

I guess he’ll have to start from the very beginning. The treatment.

He’s really not.

°°°

He sees a book on the table beside Eunhyuk’s bed, pen lodged between the pages. He picks it up, thinking that its Eunhyuk’s therapy schedule, but it turns out to be the psychiatrist’s record book.

Each page is dated, and there’s multicolored ink underneath each entry.

The red talks about someone that converses with animals daily, laughing and responding to their silence as if in actual conversation. Written in lavender is an account of a person that sleeps twenty hours every day, mumbling nonsense about Wonderland when awake. Pink shows up whenever the doctor writes about a pyromaniac, blue if he addresses the case of someone delusional. 

Delusional enough to “suffer from hallucinations of an imaginary body part”.

Although he knows he most likely won’t like what’s on the page, Donghae reads the most recent account in blue ink.

“I’ve talked to this patient for the first time since his medical therapy began. Quiet, a bit fidgety, but calm. He hasn’t given many responses at all throughout the day. Did not do anything abnormal. I believe the treatment is working as anticipated, he hasn’t uttered a word about wings or feathers today.”

Donghae thinks back to Eunhyuk’s behavior for the snippet of time he was awake, and scoffs.

°°°

After eating half his breakfast, Donghae walks down his usual route, continuing his routine to check on Eunhyuk. When he gets to the room however, all he sees is a vacant bed, no Eunhyuk in sight.

A nurse is kind enough to inform him that Patient 404 was moved to the neighboring unit, reason being better equipment and closer staff, both beneficial to a more efficient recovery. Donghae feels sick walking down the maze of hallways to the far-off section of the hospital.

He passes door after door, looking through the glass panels to the inside to know which one to enter. Further down, at the end of the hall, a group of people murmur to each other, staring at a door a few meters away. Donghae approaches that door, ignoring the eyes latching onto him, not caring what they think of him, and looks through the glass.

Donghae is about to walk closer upon spotting a tuft of platinum blonde behind the door, but is stopped by men in white coats.

“You cannot proceed any further” they say.

°°°

He isn’t allowed to see Eunhyuk anymore. They tell him he’s delaying the results of the treatment, encouraging the hallucinations. They have the nerve to claim he’s making the condition worse.

They have the sheer nerve.

The walk back to his room is a long one.

He’s teetering on the edge now, fuming yet acting calm so they don’t confine him too. Although they already have, in a sense.It takes his whole will to obey the doctors and go back to his room.

But he can’t leave Eunhyuk.

Donghae doesn’t want the boy to have his world ripped apart, to wake up one day and feel like a part of him is missing. It’s a horrible thing to experience, to have all that is familiar and safe taken away, leaving only the cold surface of the world staring back.

He’s doesn’t want the other to experience the feeling of insecurity the realization would bring.

A chance presents itself when Donghae happens upon a cart full of gloves, masks, and sanitary equipment, Band-Aids and pills lining the sides. The nurses are restocking, but after a few quick glances, he sees that there’s nobody around.

Donghae looks at the open compartment before him. It takes less than a second for him to make the decision. He grabs the nearest bottle and promptly downs its entire contents.

And he blacks out.

A/N: Part of a double update~